Sharing of Baseband Units in Fifth Generation Networks and Beyond

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise, in response to determining that the baseband unit resources are sufficient to process the traffic of the user equipment, allocating an existing distributed unit user plane node comprising the baseband unit resources to process the traffic of the user equipment.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the detecting of the user equipment context setup request message is performed by an F1 interface application protocol handler of a distributed unit control plane node.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the allocating of the additional distributed unit user plane node comprises allocating a radio link control protocol layer, a medium access control layer and a high physical layer, and assigning a range of cell subcarriers to process the traffic of the user equipment.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the allocating of the additional distributed unit user plane node is performed by a medium access control scheduler of a distributed unit control plane node.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the allocating of the additional distributed unit user plane node comprises changing the additional baseband unit resources from a first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved to a second state in which the additional baseband unit resources are active.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved comprises at least one of: a sleep state, an idle state, a reduced power state or a reduced frequency state.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the operations further comprise detecting a user equipment context release message from the gNodeB centralized unit control plane node to the gNodeB distributed unit, determining, based on the user equipment context release message, that the additional distributed unit user plane node is no longer needed for processing traffic, and deallocating the additional distributed unit user plane node.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein the deallocating of the additional distributed unit user plane node comprises changing the additional baseband unit resources from an active state to at least one of: a sleep state, an idle state, a reduced power state or a reduced frequency state.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the determining that the additional distributed unit user plane node is requested comprises evaluating traffic statistics.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein the determining that the additional distributed unit user plane node is requested comprises detecting a user equipment context setup request message from a gNodeB centralized unit control plane node to a gNodeB distributed unit.

13. The method of claim 10, further comprising, determining, by the network equipment that the additional distributed unit user plane node is no longer requested to process the user equipment traffic, and, in response to the determining, deallocating, by the network equipment, the additional distributed unit user plane node.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein the allocating of the additional baseband unit resources comprises transitioning the additional baseband unit resources from a first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved to a second state in which the additional baseband unit resources are active, and wherein the deallocating of the additional baseband unit resources comprises transitioning the additional baseband unit resources from the state in which the additional baseband unit resources are active to the first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved.

15. The method of claim 13, wherein the determining that the additional distributed unit user plane node is no longer requested comprises evaluating traffic statistics.

16. The method of claim 13, wherein the determining that the additional distributed unit user plane node is no longer requested comprises detecting a user equipment context release message from a gNodeB centralized unit control plane node to a gNodeB distributed unit.

18. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 17, wherein the allocating of the additional baseband unit resources comprises transitioning the additional baseband unit resources from a first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved to a second state in which the additional baseband unit resources are active.

20. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 19, wherein the deallocating of the additional baseband unit resources comprises transitioning the additional baseband unit resources from a first state in which the additional baseband unit resources are active to a second state in which the additional baseband unit resources are conserved.